Conversations from the Dice Awards green room

Last week, the luminaries of the game industry accepted awards on stage at the Dice Awards event in Las Vegas before hundreds of their peers.

The message from Larian Studios, which made the Game of the Year — Baldur’s Gate 3 — was particularly appropriate amid the opulence of the event.

“Many, many people were let go at the start of this year,” said Michael Douse, the director of publishing for the studio, on stage as he accepted an award. “I want you to know that you are all talented, and that you matter, and that you are the future of this industry. Don’t let that flame be extinguished by our collective mistakes. We will persevere as an industry.”

Greg Miller of KindaFunny and Stella Chung of IGN hosted the awards and they also started out with an acknowledgement of layoffs in the game industry. The job losses topped 10,500 in 2023 and another 6,000 have been laid off already since the beginning of 2024.

Those messages were a good acknowledgement of the industry’s pain, and they were important to hear on the big stage. I also had some nice moments as I a chance to sit in the green room and interview the winners as they walked off stage. That was a privileged experience and I wanted to share some of the short interviews I did with the award recipients.

Koji Kondo, Hall of Fame inductee

The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences inducted into its Hall of Fame Koji Kondo, the legendary Japanese music composer, pianist and sound director for his contributions to Nintendo over a 40-year career. Backstage, I asked Koji Kondo of Nintendo why he made a career from game music.

Speaking through an interpreter, he said, “First and foremost, I like to say I like games. And I think games have the power to make the gaming experience more fun and engaging. And I also thought it would offer me the opportunity to take on challenges of incorporating lots of different types of music into games.

Brian Tyler, composer of music for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, presented Kondo with the award. I asked Tyler about the importance of games in mass culture, given the success of the adaptations of games into movies.

He said, “Funny because I was a gamer. It used to be the thing that the industry people looked down upon games until a certain point. They started noticing. Wow, these are doing better than our films. Once games passed film, they started taking it seriously. But I was always there and was always hoping that that immersive incredible experience could be understood by all and nowadays it’s it’s not just for us gamers. It’s for everybody. To be able to score games as well movies, it was a dream to do.

I know that it’s tough for indie game companies to get attention for their titles. But when they win awards like Cocoon did, they have a chance to convince fans to give their game a try. Geometric Interactive’s Cocoon won the award for best mobile game. Asked why fans should try it, Jeppe Carlson, lead gameplay designer at Geometric Interactive, said that the selling point of the game is taking a world and holding it in your hands and then going inside it.

Baldur’s Gate 3

David Walgrave, head of production at Larian Studios, came off stage with a bunch of team members. I asked him about the size of the team and how the numbers have been growing for triple-A game production. he said that 400 people worked on Baldur’s Gate 3, which started six years ago with a team of about 100 people. That’s actually considered small compared to other teams in the industry.

“We tried to prepare as a company because we knew what our aspirations were. We knew we were going to build a triple-A RPG because it needs to be because it’s Baldur’s Gate 3,” Walgrave said. “We also as a company wanted to grow like we did after Original Sin. And then we did Original Sin 2. We already recognized we can still improve on certain things and be recognized as triple A.”

He added, “And with all of the ambition that we had, we needed to grow. We wanted proper cinematics in there. And I think a very big chunk of our team is the cinematic designers and animators and all of those guys. We prepared for it as much as we could by talking to people who had gone through the same growth and figured out like how can we organize this.”

With hindsight, he said the team did a lot of retrospectives on Baldur’s Gate 3 and he thinks they can still improve how they handle such a big team in the wake of its success.

“Even after preparing and actually having launched the game you still see like there’s room for improvement,” Walgrave said.

I asked the winners what they think about video games as an art form and how video games are being elevated in mass culture to be more important than Hollywood.

Michael Douse, director of publishing at Larian Studios, said, “Have you ever heard of Marcel Duchamp? He took a urinal that was built by somebody and put it into place based on the idea that because it was created by someone who has inherently crafted and therefore by definition, it was art. When that happened, this conversation died, Because it was their art. Marvel movies are art. And Scorsese movies are art and what video games people do is art. The guys who build traffic cones are also artists. It’s just if you’re creating something, you’re an artist. The market is irrelevant. The selling doesn’t diminish it, in my opinion.”

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 winners

I asked every one of Marvel’s Spider-Man winners if they would sing the Spider-Man song. Only one took me up on it and he told me not to share the video.

Mike Fitzgerald, director of core technology at Insomniac Games, accepted the award for technical achievement. I asked him if something captured his attention as a technical achievement on the PlayStation 5 version of the game above and beyond earlier Spider-Man games on prior consoles.

“Absolutely. I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish on the PS5. And hopefully people feel like it was a big step up. For us, the big thing for this generation was to add the raytraced reflections into New York City. You notice it everywhere. It just becomes one of those things that you expect to see out of a one-time render. And when you don’t see it anymore, it really stands out,” Fitzgerald said.

Asked what can bring the console to its knees, Fitzgerald said, “So much of development is our designers come up with a grand idea, we put it in the game, and then it runs terribly and we have to figure out how to make that actually work. There is one scene I worked on for a long time when Venom appears for the first time and we have this image of tentacles going across the city and they’re going up buildings and they’re in the background. The memory on that was terrible for a long time. So we worked on that specific scene to get everything running. We can almost do anything. You just need to pick the things you want to work on. Really focus on.”

Spider-Man 2 also won for best audio.

Responding to a query from Bryant Francis at Game Developer, Jerry Berlongieri, senior audio director at Insomniac Games, said the wingsuit was one of the most unexpected sounds in the game. He said one of Herschel Bailey, senior advanced sound designer, put these balloons on his fingers and shook them. They made the sound of a wingsuit fluttering in the wind.

“It just ridiculous, but it just sounded great to get it. That was a fun one,” said Berlongieri, who won the award for best audio in a game.

Nadji Anthony Jeter played the role of Miles Morales in Spider-Man 2. He won the award for outstanding achievement in character. I asked him how he approached the emotional role of Morales.

“With the stories of Spider-Man in general, you just go through a lot. I know the Peter Parker story and Miles’ story. They have a lot of pain that they have to overcome. I believe everyone in life has to deal with that. Everyone has to deal with adversity or trial or tribulation in their life,” Jeter said. “They have to overcome and become that hero for somebody else. I feel like that is the No. 1 thing that the story represents for everybody. Every race, every gender. I’ve had little kids from little girls to older men in their 60s saying how much they love the story and how much Spider Man has impacted their lives.”

James Ham, associate animation director at Insomniac Games, said the fan reaction to the game was was a “gigantic hug” while Bobby Coddington, senior animation director, said it was a very surreal experience.

“When we started putting the trailers out and we saw Sandman throw Miles away, the reaction that the short clip got was amazing, to see how awe-inspiring that was for people,” Ham said.

“For anybody who makes like YouTube videos or fan reaction videos, those things feed us,” Coddington said. “When people freak out, and they’re as excited as you want them to be right when you wanted them to be excited. Or when they cry over the story, it’s just everything. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do is connect with people and make them feel these things. And when it works, I mean, it can’t feel any better.”

MLB: The Show

Ramone Russell, Sony San Diego Studio’s product development communications and brand strategist for MLB: The Show talked about creating a fantasy for fans to relive experiences of their favorite baseball players. I asked him what it was like to make an award-winning game for a title that comes out every year.

He said he took pride in the game’s depiction of the Negro Leagues into the game for the first time.

“I think you you have to do the work, and not worry about anything else. It’s never about the end result. It’s always about creating it and also doing things differently and trying new things,” Russell said. “This year, we introduced the Negro Leagues into our game, which was very difficult. Not a lot of people wanted us to do that. We had to do it. But we knew we needed to do it in the right way.”

He added, “We needed to be able to tell a story because 95% of our audience has no idea what the heck the Negro Leagues are. We knew if we just threw these individuals into the game, it wouldn’t resonate. So we needed to tell a story. Luckily for us, you know, we’re 10 years removed from everyone knowing that video games are a fantastic medium to tell stories.”

They shot footage at the Rawlings Baseball Museum in Kansas City and talked with the veterans at the museum to make sure they could nail the educational part of the leagues.

“It was a really fantastic endeavor for everybody involved. And it’s been really amazing to see the museum reap the benefits of that because for us the most important thing is making sure that that museum was in a better place than before we started. And that has happened,” Russell said. “We’ve also been able to show that you can educate in video games. You can tell really impactful heartfelt stories. That’s something that a lot of educators are struggling with. You really have to meet kids where they’re at today. You have to make things engaging for them. And we were able to do that in a sports video game.”

Diablo IV

Rod Fergusson, executive producer for Diablo IV, noted that you can’t make everybody happy with the choices you make as a game designer. You have to make peace with that understanding, he said. He noted that its live services allows Blizzard to evolve the experience over time and let the fans get caught up in the changing story with each season. Asked (by Bryant Francis at Game Developer) if Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard just to get Fergusson back, he joked, “I told them you could have just given me $1 billion directly and saved $68 billion. I would have come back I would have come back for a billion.”

I asked Fergusson how to convince people should play Diablo IV despite some of the hate it has received on social media for things like microtransactions.

“Just play it for yourself. When you go in and you play the story, you realize what really is there. Diablo is a game franchise. It’s about the ultimate power fantasy. We want us to win and think about what that power fantasy is and realize it and again, season after season, the game gets better and better. We love that story we told in the campaign. So what I would say is like, give it a shot and play the campaign and then make your decision from there.”

Asked by GameFile’s Stephen Totilo about what the game industry is going through right now, how should industry leaders look at issues such as their responsibility for teams.

“Obviously, you have to be empathetic. And you have to understand what the teams are going through when you’re trying to work through it. I think one of the things that helps people through these things is knowing what you have to do next, like what’s that focus? And that’s what I really liked about our plans is that when we know what our plans are, when people have to go through challenging times, they are not lost on what to do next year.”

Alan Wake 2

Sam Lake, creative director at Remedy Entertainment, accepted the award for best art direction for Alan Wake 2.

I noted the game’s jump scares gave me lots of little heart attacks.

“There is now an option to to tone them down,” Lake said. “It’s interesting creating games. There are not so many tracks in a complex interaction. We were planning jump scares as part of the narrative flow. At some point, looking into the effects and certain moments of enemies teleporting away and things like that, we needed something. And then we ended up ended up using that same effect for that. And that maybe in a total, there ended up being quite a lot of it. It was definitely part of the design and plan to have them. Now, at least if it feels like too much,” you can tone it down.

I also asked him about the fan reaction to the Champion of Light song and the Old Gods of Asgard band.

“We worked with Poets of the Fall as our Old Gods of Asgard band ever since the first Alan Wake game. And part of my plan going into this was that we needed at least three songs and then we could put our a full album of the Old Gods of Asgard,” Lake said. “That was already there, in the background, and we wanted with them to create basically what we did in Alan Wake One, which is one very critical plot point, a heavy metal fighting song, but then something new and taking learnings from Control where that whole kind of dynamic song was received so positively.”

They tried a musical in Control but then ended up taking it out. Then Lake wondered if they could top that experience from Control and that led them into doing a musical sequence.

“It’s so much work. But it just felt so important and I was so happy to see the reaction and the positive response to it,” Lake said.

I noted there were parts of the game where you felt either hopelessness or hope, especially toward the end, and it felt like the devs were aware of having an impact on the mental health of the players. They didn’t want to leave them completely without hope and maybe closed by taking it easier on gamers.

Lake responded, “I don’t know if I saw it from the perspective of taking easier but just like having heart and having soul us as part of it. And the plan for me always was really from the first high level vision was that because of the loop and the spiral as a concept, that we should give hope.”

He added, “And yet we should have an anxious horror ending. But the idea is that because it’s a loop you’ll go back to the beginning and then the new game plus as a reward for everybody who goes through it twice. Then we give more hope along the way.”

Asgard’s Wrath 2

Agard’s Wrath 2 won for best VR game. I spoke with a trio of creators of Asgard’s Wrath 2: Matt Kramer, studio creative director at Meta’s Sanzaru Games; Evan Arnold, technical director; and Bill Spence, game director. I asked if VR was hitting its stride.

“I personally do feel like it’s starting to turn the corner. And we’re breaking barriers and proving to people that it is. Like having like people spent 250 plus hours in a headset is proving that people will spend time with the headset. So that I think validates just the right direction,” Spence said.

Kramer added, “We’ve we’ve been making VR games now since 2016. And you could see the trend. I mean, we started with VR sports with a hand presence, light movement, full body, a lot of locomotion. Asgard’s Wrath One was really the pinnacle of what we wanted to make. And you could see the evolution. You can see the amount of people that are using the headsets. And what we see now for Asgard’s Wrath 2 is tenfold what we saw in 2019. Like I said on stage, this is only the beginning.”

He said, “You have two categories here that cover immersive reality. And you’re going to see one day that there will be a Game of the Year up there. And it’s going to be a VR game. You mark my words. That is going to happen.”